Tried everything but stuck.

Anyways, just tought I'd run my dilemma by you guys and see if anyone can come up with something.

I look afer several websites for my company and one of them was completely remodelled several months ago and re-published. The site is completely SEO'd up as much as I can do.

Here is what I've done:

Re-Created the site with using as little tables as possible

Ensured the site is compliant with HTML and CSS and WAI-A regulations

Made sure every image has an alt description, every h1 tag is relevant to the page, every link has a title etc

Created a site map, one normal sitemap and one using Googles sitemap generator

Update the GoogleSitemaps everytime I do some changes

Added about 70 good content, key word rich pages

Added a forum which isn't used that much but has about 30 topics on it.

Site was already on most search engines, but not ranked high.

Saw a big jump from 400/500's circa 90 in position.

Have a PR of 6 and have had it for a long time.

Links from many reputable websites including Times, Financial Times etc etc.

Haven't done any sort of spam etc

Meta-tags are relevant and are not spamming.

Page Titles are all relevant to each page.

But after all this, all I can get is at top 79'th position for one keyword that is very relevant and important to the website.

The fact that I can't get to the top 2/3 pages isn't what's annoying me, it's the fact that I keep on analyzing the top 10 results and can't find anythign they're really good at compared to my website.

Here is an comparison of my site vs other top 10 websites:

My Website

Google Position: 79

Google PR: 6

Keyword Occurences: 56

Keyword Density: 22.13%

Alexa Ranking: 424,641

Google BackLinks: 109

Google Cached Pages: 308

Age of Domain: 2yrs 8mths

Competitor Site 1

Google Position: 1

Google PR: 5

Keyword Occurences: 89

Keyword Density: 17.8%

Alexa Ranking: 458,426

Google BackLinks: 54

Google Cached Pages: 18

Age of Domain: 7yrs 7mths

Competitor Site 2

Google Position: 2

Google PR: 6

Keyword Occurences: 59

Keyword Density: 24.69%

Alexa Ranking: 47,432

Google BackLinks: 924 (48)

Google Cached Pages: 41,600 (404)

Age of Domain: 7yrs 2mths

Competitor Site 3

Google Position: 3

Google PR: None

Keyword Occurences: 23

Keyword Density: 8.1%

Alexa Ranking: 66,832

Google BackLinks: 114

Google Cached Pages: 355

Age of Domain: 7yrs 2mths

Competitor Site 4

Google Position: 5

Google PR: 5

Keyword Occurences: 19

Keyword Density: 11.95%

Alexa Ranking: 240,033

Google BackLinks: 26

Google Cached Pages: 20

Age of Domain: 5yrs 2mths

Competitor Site 5

Google Position: 6

Google PR: 6

Keyword Occurences: 14

Keyword Density: 8.09%

Alexa Ranking: None

Google BackLinks: 221

Google Cached Pages: 195

Age of Domain: 7yrs 2mths

Competitor Site 5

Google Position: 9

Google PR: 6

Keyword Occurences: 15

Keyword Density: 13.89%

Alexa Ranking: 144,548

Google BackLinks: 897

Google Cached Pages: 228

Age of Domain:5yrs 3mths

Although I can see a large nuber of site and BL difference between most of the top pages and mine, what I can't figure out is the website that is returned on the first page.

The only large discrepancy I can see from my website is the age of the domain name. Does the age of a domain name really make that much difference?

Is there anything else I can do that I've forgotten about or anything else I need to be checking?

Yes, that's going to be a tough one. In google.co.uk (pages from the web) you're in the 40's so you're not doing badly. Even an authority site like the BBC is only a few results ahead of you.

To improve you would probably need some high-quality, big-hitting inbound links. That will take time and/or money which you could alternatively choose to allocate to your other target keyphrases. Then there is the 'long tail' for which you could consider adding more articles or a blog.

Yes, that's going to be a tough one. In google.co.uk (pages from the web) you're in the 40's so you're not doing badly. Even an authority site like the BBC is only a few results ahead of you.

To improve you would probably need some high-quality, big-hitting inbound links. That will take time and/or money which you could alternatively choose to allocate to your other target keyphrases. Then there is the 'long tail' for which you could consider adding more articles or a blog.

Thank you John.

Yes, I knew we weren't that bad on .co.uk but I obviously want us to be as high as possible on the .com site, for the plain reason that I use it

Obscure keyphrases which you would never think of optimising for but which crop up in your web stats in ones and twos. Individually they don't count for much but collectively they can bring a lot of traffic. The more content you have in the form of articles, blogs and forums the better you are placed to harvest these.

Obscure keyphrases which you would never think of optimising for but which crop up in your web stats in ones and twos. Individually they don't count for much but collectively they can bring a lot of traffic. The more content you have in the form of articles, blogs and forums the better you are placed to harvest these.

Thanks mate.

I had been thinking of asking one of our employees to start a blog and maybe this is the push I needed.

Can you (or anyone else) explain the discrepancy in results? Why is the Number 1 ranked website actually in that position?

Had a quick look at their links with Yahoo linkdomain:. This one is top:
www. soon. org. uk/cvpage.htm

That's a dream link. Good PR page, relevant content, one-way (I guess), link in main body of page, not many other links on the page. Then there are other factors which you can't measure such as trust and authority, but I'd guess those are high too. Links like that are probably what you'd need to cultivate in order to compete. As I say, it's tough.

The age of the domain matters a hell of a lot. Much more than you believe. Google almost never ranks new domains well unless its an extremely low competition keyword. It is to avoid the here today gone tomorrow kind of websites.

How long has your new site been published? Is it cached? Do the pages of the revamped site match the pages google has in its index for the old one? Did you do any 301's for pages that may no longer be there?

How long has your new site been published? Is it cached? Do the pages of the revamped site match the pages google has in its index for the old one? Did you do any 301's for pages that may no longer be there?

The site went live in the first week of April if I remember correctly. Most of the pages are cached, however, there were still some old pages that were coming up in the cache. I've created 301's for them. Thanks for that.

Yes, I do think the age thing makes a difference, but we've been around for well over 2 years now.